Diana Markosian: Inventing My Father, a return to Moscow

Inventing My Father

Markosian was seven years old in October 1996 when her mother woke her and her brother and said they were going on a trip. They did not say goodbye to their father. The next day they arrived in southern California, a place the family already knew from watching the American soap opera Santa Barbara. The Soviet Union had collapsed and so had the household: the months before the departure had been spent avoiding landlords and collecting bottles in exchange for food.

Her mother's method of forgetting was literal. She cut her husband's image out of every photograph in the family album, and the holes she left behind did the opposite of what was intended — they made the absence permanent and specific. Fifteen years later Markosian travelled halfway around the world to stand in the courtyard of the same grey Soviet building she remembered as a child, and the project begins at that point: a visual diary of an attempt to reconnect with a man she describes as looking back at her without recognition.

Documentary practice built on absence and archive

Born in 1989, Markosian was working as a documentary photographer based in Moscow when the project was made. Her assignments had already taken her from Russia's North Caucasus mountains to the ancient Silk Road in Tajikistan and overland to the remote Wakhan Corridor in north-eastern Afghanistan — reporting territory a long way from a family album.

What makes Inventing My Father unusual within that body of work is its method. Rather than photographing a subject she had found, Markosian reconstructed a relationship she had lost, combining new photographs with the mutilated family archive itself. The holes her mother cut become part of the visual language of the series rather than a private detail behind it, which is why the work reads as an investigation rather than a memoir.

Publication, exhibition and recognition

By the time of the grant her images had appeared in the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Foto8, Marie Claire, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Sunday Times, Time.com and World Policy Journal. The work had also been exhibited through international organisations including the Open Society Institute's Moving Walls programme, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UNICEF.

Earlier recognition included Columbia University's photographer of the year in 2010, second place in multimedia at the National Press Photographers Association in 2011, a place in Reuters' best 100 photographs of that year, the Marie Claire International Photography Award in 2012 and a place on Reportage by Getty Images' Emerging Talent roster the same year. In 2013 she received the Photographic Museum of Humanity's New Generation Grant and Burn Magazine's Emerging Photographer Fund, and was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam.

The Firecracker panel that awarded the 2014 grant also highly commended the British photographer Sian Davey for Looking for Alice, a project made about the photographer's daughter, who has Down's syndrome.

The grant arrived at a specific point in the work's life, which is the point of a completion award. Markosian already had the reporting career, the awards and the access; what she did not have was the means to finish a project that was structurally different from assignment work and could not be sold as it went along.

For anyone reading this entry as a case study, the useful observation is how the personal and the professional material fed each other rather than competing. The reporting years in the Caucasus and Central Asia taught Markosian how to work in places where access is fragile and time is short — and Inventing My Father applies exactly those skills to the hardest access of all, a parent who does not know her. The reverse is also true: the family project gave the assignment work a visible interior life, a reason beyond the news cycle. Juries read portfolios for that kind of coherence. A body of work in which the personal project explains the reporting, and the reporting equips the personal project, is far easier to fund than either half on its own.